He’s even regularly interviewed on several radio stations in Australia.

The reason for the introduction is that we’re excited to announce that Gerald Celente will be writing for Markets and Money. Gerald’s record as a trend forecaster is both lengthy and enviable.

For over 35 years he has picked apart daily newspapers, trade journals and magazines to isolate the key events that are happening across the globe.

We’re not just talking finance either. Celente’s expertise includes politics, culture and history. He likes to know where we’ve been to see where we’re going.

As he says, ‘trends are born, they grow and they die.’

Gerald has an uncanny knack for following the trends that matter and linking the forces that drive them into predictable outcomes.

He often makes his forecasts long before they actually happen, and ages before the mainstream media catch on.

Back in the 1990s he forecast the rise of environmentalism, organic markets and whole health healing.

He saw the coming clash between Islam and the West as part of a revival of a centuries old religious war.

He forecast the collapse of 2008 and the rise of the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ movement.

But these aren’t forecasts made from some ivory tower. The aim of his work is to give you actionable intelligence about what’s happening in the world.

That’s so you can know things like…

Whether consumer preferences are moving away or toward the products that will affect the stocks you own.

Which industries are expanding and can provide a healthy job market for your children and grandchildren.

The influences that come to bear on the different generations and why these age groups develop in such contrasting directions.

Not only does Gerald do this accurately, he does it objectively. He’s a self-confessed ‘political atheist’. He’s not afraid to call a spade a spade, either. In the 2012 US presidential election, he described Obama as an ‘empty suit’, and Mitt Romney as a ‘stuffed shirt.’

That’s the kind of political appraisals we appreciate here at The Markets and Money. Gerald’s experience in politics means his coverage of the current US presidential campaign is not to be missed.

As a Markets and Money reader, you can now look forward to Gerald’s sceptical, impassioned and objective analysis and forecasts.

We’re certain you’ll enjoy it…

And now, we’ll throw it over to Gerald.

***

The Upgrade Your Smartphone Is Craving

The synergy of many advancing technologies, from artificial intelligence to 3D or hologram viewing, is increasingly being controlled and managed from the palm of your hand.

Consider your phone’s camera…

It isn’t just for snapping memories of Aunt Martha’s birthday party or the kids at Six Flags any more.

Pros use smartphone cameras on assignment. Artists use them to create gallery works.

Now, with new apps and attachments, your smartphone camera is becoming a tool for everyone from architects to high-tech manufacturers.

There’s a growing menu of attachable assets…

Leading optics makers such as Zeiss now offer clip-on lenses to expand your photo options.

The same wide-angle, zoom and specialty lenses that are standard fare for full-size cameras are now available to smartphone shutterbugs.

The lenses come with a harness that holds them in just the right place over the eye of your phone’s camera.

You’re not even limited to two dimensions. A company called Occipital in San Francisco makes an iPhone attachment that will take a 3-D photo of anything.

It can be used by architects and interior designers to take a 3D photo of a room — with all of its colours — and transfer that to a computer where different designs can be tried out in virtual reality.

Occipital’s Structure Sensor also can be used to scan any object or person. The scan can be transferred to a 3D printer and a ‘hard copy’ of the object can be run off in plastic, metal or a combination of materials. The scan also can be used to create computer-aided designs for mass manufacture.

LG makes one with a regular lens and also a separate wide-angle lens. Some cameras let you adjust the focus manually or choose between colour and black-and-white pictures.

HTC and others offer the ability to create special effects, such as blurred backgrounds to highlight a sharply focused object at the front of the picture. More and more cameras include image stabilisation, which eliminates blur when a camera moves as a photo is being snapped.

Pixels — the little dots of colour that together form a photo image — are a particular challenge. Because the lens is so small, the pixels have to be small to make the picture sharp. Some are only a thousandth of an inch across.

That leaves room for visual ‘noise’ that can render a photo less sharp. Samsung and other makers are working hard to screen out that noise.

Still, even with these advances, many insiders now wonder if smartphone cameras are as good as they’re going to get.

Upgrading those little lenses and optics systems will require investment in research, development and the manufacture of parts with microscopically fine tolerances.

In short, there’s truly disruptive technology on the horizon for what your phone can do and how well it can do it.

Gerald Celente is founder and director of The Trends Research Institute, author of Trends 2000 and Trend Tracking (Warner Books), and publisher of The Trends Journal. He has been forecasting trends since 1980, and recently called “The Collapse of ’09.”

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